The family of a 17-year-old boy at the center of a federal hazardous materials investigation at an Irvine home rejects the suggestion that he may have threatened public safety, according to their attorney.
“People are afraid of what they don’t understand,” the lawyer, Charles M. Ray, said in a brief interview on Saturday. “This is someone who is going to help cure cancer one day. He is not a terrorist.”
Ray described the equipment inside the teenager’s home-based laboratory as benign, including items such as Bunsen burners and other materials “found in a sixth-grade lab”.